


Dragonbane

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Civil War, Dragons, Dreams and Nightmares, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Kings & Queens, Memories, Pre-A Game of Thrones, Pre-Canon, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-05-06
Packaged: 2018-06-06 15:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6760132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aegon the Dragonbane, the Unlucky, the Broken King, lost his heart years ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dragonbane

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn’t get the thought of young Aegon witnessing his mother’s death out of my head, and the more I read about him the more I had to write this portrait. I own nothing.

_Sunfyre’s scales of beaten gold looked dull as tarnished copper under the overcast skies of Dragonstone. One of the dragon’s great wings was a twisted mess of white scars and membranes flushed raspberry pink. He only had one eye left, but his teeth were still as long as half a man and sharper than unblooded swords._

_The biggest dragon in the realm had been blooded many times. Mother looked into his molten-gold eye and refused to be stared down…_

Aegon of House Targaryen, the Third of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, Protector of the Realm, awoke gasping for breath, with a sharp pain in his chest and tears bathing his cheeks. 

Aegon never bedded his first wife, dead in her tenth summer, a suicide or so they claimed. Aegon never heard of children who took their own lives, either. After the third time he woke to feel Daenaera’s hands on him, her body crowding in and threatening to smother him, he no longer allowed his second wife to sleep by his side through the night. Overriding her tears and entreaties, the advice of his brother and goodsister, and the suggestions of his small council, Aegon insisted that Daenaera keep her own chambers, far from his. If he summoned her early of an evening, she had to leave as soon as they were done coupling. Aegon never wanted to be held or to murmur sweet nothings. 

“All men enjoy such sweet companionship,” Daenaera protested once.

“And how do you know what all men enjoy?” Aegon enquired mildly, without any real interest, yet the remark proved sufficient to make Daenaera hold her tongue on the subject thenceforth. 

Aegon only started allowing Daenaera to do something other than sleep by his side several years into their marriage. Her hands felt always too warm and moist or too cool and moist, but sometimes he needed the oblivion her body offered. Then, of course, there was his duty to the realm. 

Aegon was the seventh king from House Targaryen, and the Citadel had proclaimed that his reign would be blessed by the Seven because of it. Aegon doubted the maesters knew anything about anything or that the Seven regarded anyone with care or interest. 

When Grand Maester Munkun crowned him with the elaborate, heavy crown of his namesake and ancestor, the court rose as one, former blacks on one side of the great throne room, former greens on the other. Speaking as one, they acclaimed Aegon a king of peace and plenty, while outside the tall windows snow buried King’s Landing in a silent shroud. The Winter continued for another five years. Even after it passed, Aegon could never seem to leave the war of his youth behind or trust the words and faces of men and women – not while their hands twitched with greed and envy by their sides, in the heavy folds of their court robes, or twisted the ragged hems of their homespun while they cheered him in the streets. 

_“Mother, flee!” he cried in vain, realizing a mere moment before she did what the burned bodies hanging from the gate of his childhood home meant._

_His mother was through with fleeing. She had never done so easily, and there was nowhere but home left for her to go._

_Aegon kept calling to her as his uncle’s men held him fast, looking bored with the squirming child they restrained with heavy, gauntleted fists. She never turned her head to look at him, offer a last smile or a tender word. Rhaenyra Targaryen had loved all her children fiercely, not tenderly, and all of Aegon’s brothers as well as his father were dead. Rhaenyra’s dragon was dead as well, her sworn swords broken or scattered. Aegon alone made a puny weapon, and so she had no final words for him._

_He did not actually see Sunfyre devour her, but he felt the heat coming off the great beast, and he thought he heard the crunch of bones and the hitch of pain or triumph in his crippled uncle’s breath. A servant who brought him food and water, and took away his waste pail after his uncle had shut him up in the dungeon, told Aegon that his screams had filled the courtyard that day, the day his mother had died._

_Aegon turned away from the servant’s grimy, wheedling face and said nothing. The smoking torch in the servant’s hand hurt his eyes, and the turnkey who’d let her in growled like a bear from the dark corridor for the girl to hurry up and not talk to the brat._

Aegon’s cheeks were dry when he woke, but the sharp pain in his chest took some time to abate. If all he could utter were screams no one cared to hear or words no one listened to, and none were there to listen to him but knaves and spies and upjumped lordlings, then why should he speak at all?

His own name disgusted him, for it had been his uncle’s name before him. He hated the crown of the first Aegon and chose to wear a simple gold circlet instead, let the court sycophants murmur what they would. Nobody demanded much from him in his first years as king, and Aegon was not loath to avoid the courtiers fawning over him even as their lips twitched with distaste at his somber clothes, his pale, severe mien, an old man in a child’s body. He signed the parchments his regents thrust before him and went away as soon as he was able without a word of parting. 

Mushroom would cease his capering and bow to the boy king with mock solemnity when they met. Aegon understood it for a gesture of respect, for he was the only person at court from whom Mushroom had never teased forth a laugh, however grudging or sour. 

On those rare occasions when Aegon had spent time with Jaehaera, Munkun and Jaehaera’s septa had suggested they might try playing together. They might as well have suggested that two tortoises should learn Dornish veil dancing. They had been too much alike for Aegon to have appreciated Jaehaera while she’d lived, and they had been too little together for him to remember her well or often. 

Daenaera accused him once of having a wad of cotton in place of a heart. He did not seem to feel as other men did, flashes of irresistible fire in his veins as strong as those he had seen and smelled and felt during the war, while dragons had still flown and danced. Instead, Aegon watched and weighed how false the faces of men and the smiles of women could be.

His reign began in Winter, wolves howling all around. Aegon remembered them all, all the wolves in men’s bodies – he kept their faces before his eyes whatever he did, to remind him how they’d clustered around him yet kept their distance, as though he had been a wishing well hiding a hungry monster. Lord Cregan Stark thirsting for vengeance to sate his honor and satisfy his men’s cupidity for southern riches – that wolf had gone home, slaughtering what he found and building nothing in its stead. Ser Tyland Lannister with his scarred, unseeing face had had as much of Aegon’s trust as the young king had ever given anyone, despite their history, yet Aegon’s hands had always shaken in Lannister’s company, for the man’s wounds and blindness had been wrought by Aegon’s mother, and the boy could not forget. Grasping Unwin Peake, valorous, puffed-up Alyn Velaryon, Aegon’s Kingsguard filled with bastard names, their faces all the same behind their helmets with dark eye slits… 

When Viserys came back, washed up by the Narrow Sea as though one returned from the Stranger’s lap, for once Aegon felt what he believed other men felt, and as strongly. In the company of Viserys’ Lyseni wife, who never looked at Aegon as though he were some strange beast, with all the memories and sorrows the brothers held in common, though they’d shared precious few experiences in the intervening years, Aegon began to suspect he might not be alone.

“You should be king, Viserys,” he confided one day in a burst of uncustomary pique, having just escaped a small council meeting at which all had feigned to be explaining his realm to him, when really they had merely aired policies already made and approved, to show how clever they were. “They listen to you, and they smile when you speak. The smallfolk would love you steadfastly. Lords would abide by your word happily enough.”

Viserys did not reply at once. “What foolishness is this, dear brother?” he said at last. “Whither law and custom and the right of eldest surviving sons if you, who must be an example to all, adopt that stance?” 

Viserys’ voice was light, he asked questions to which the answers seemed self-evident ( _showing how clever he was_ ), yet his eyes blazed like the sun striking the sea at high noon. Aegon never forgot how Viserys seemed to be convincing himself in that moment. He trusted Viserys as his Hand, always. Most days, he loved Viserys like a man should love his only remaining brother. But the love and the trust could not quite meet and join together, not after that conversation. 

Before his brother’s return, Gaemon had been the only one Aegon trusted, for the boy had been nearly the same as Aegon: a pretend king at best, a pawn at worst. With their pale hair and slight build, they’d even looked alike. 

How like his small council, which claimed to serve in the king and the realm’s best interest, to first make Gaemon take the punishments incurred by Aegon’s sullen silences – for mischief was alien to his nature – then later turn Gaemon into Aegon’s food taster. 

Gaemon lay twitching on the dais by the royal table, a substance like seafoam on his lips, his eyes bloodshot. A Kingsguard laid his heavy, gauntleted fist on Aegon’s shoulder to stop the king from going to his only friend, the only brother he had left.

“The poison may be passed on through the skin, your grace,” Munkun murmured while bending over Gaemon’s body, having eyes for neither boy, only for the changes being wrought on Gaemon’s dying flesh.

Aegon said nothing. There was nothing to say, ever, in his life. 

_Dragonstone’s dungeons were the kernel around which the island swelled. They lay so deep inside the rock that Aegon heard neither the booming of the surf and the crack of ever-present thunder, nor the dying screams of Sunfyre. The servant who sometimes passed him snatches of news like morsels of food told him, much later, how his uncle had wept by his dragon’s twisted carcass, like a child at the death of a parent._

_Aegon knew nothing of this when he woke in the dark and sensed a figure bending over him._

_Reeking of wine and a man’s sour sweat, the stranger carried no light, yet Aegon’s eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and recognized his uncle by how the man held his ruined legs and leaned on his heavy cane, more a gilded cudgel than a stick._

_Aegon II bent over his sleeping nephew and gripped his cane as the weapon it was. The boy Aegon lay unmoving and unmoved, wondering as from a great distance whether it would finally all be over._

_Warm water dripped on his cheek. Still he did not move. He could hear his uncle’s heavy breathing echo from the rough-hewn walls, and he thought,_ You killed my mother just because you could. _Rhaenyra would have rejoiced in her half-brother’s grief and sorrow over Sunfyre’s death, but Aegon felt nothing save mild impatience. What was his uncle waiting for, why did he stay his hand from slaying the son after he had slain the mother?_

_Aegon II straightened with a grunt and hobbled out of the cell. The door slammed shut behind him, so the child imprisoned within would know how close his death had come, and tremble at the knowledge._

Once, when Aegon was still a boy and newly crowned, the Kingsguard standing outside his bedchamber heard him cry out in his sleep and sent for Grand Maester Munkun. 

Munkun was as kind a man as ever survived the never-ending jockeying for position in the Citadel and the Red Keep. He tried to coax the king into talking of his childhood during the war, claiming it would ease Aegon’s troubled heart, but Aegon refused to speak.

Rhaenyra had kept her silent son close during her brief summer as queen, the most unlikely cupbearer ever to have served at court. She’d kept him closer still after their flight from the capital, stealing out of the city on foot like common thieves, under cover of night and the madness reigning in the streets. On their journey to Dragonstone, she had even insisted that Aegon share her bed, to keep him safe. Or perhaps she had feared being alone, for she’d wept in her sleep and cried out for Syrax. Aegon had lain beside her, as unmoving and dumb as a log, and dared not touch or wake her, for he had not known whether he had it in him to give his mother comfort. 

“She missed her dragon,” he told Munkun at last, surly and wanting to go back to sleep. Perhaps the old maester would leave if Aegon said something, anything. 

Munkun’s eyes turned shrewd, but he stroked his beard slowly, as though soothing it, the links of his chain clinking and shifting with the motion, copper and silver and red, black and yellow and pale ice-blue in the candlelight. 

“The bond between dragon and dragonrider is ill-understood but strong, stronger even than that between twins who shared a womb. Perhaps it is the strongest bond in nature,” Munkun intoned, half a lecture and half a confidence. A secret shared in the dead of night, when all others slept. 

“I have not experienced it myself, of course, and few have written of it, but to lose one’s dragon as… as happened to your grace’s mother or to Lady Jaehaera,” Munkun continued after the briefest hesitation. “The sundering must be as terrible and all-consuming as though one lost one half of oneself. Nothing remains untouched by it.”

Aegon’s eyes itched. He would not rub them while Munkun watched him so intently, as though he expected the king to burst into song or prophesy. After a few long moments, the Grand Maester sighed, produced a vial of milk of the poppy from his robes, and left the king to his rest. 

_Cold drizzle came down as the battle raged below. Stormcloud was a paler grey than the clouds, and his eyes were the blue of summer skies. He was too young to fly, too weak to carry a rider, but he strained and beat his wings against the wind, putting distance between his prince and the battle._

_Aegon looked back, over his shoulder, but the ships were smudges of brown and black on the tossing sea. He could barely make out clashing figures on the decks, let alone catch sight of his brother. Viserys had cried, refused to leave his dragon egg behind. Aegon had begged him, grabbed his brother’s arm and pulled. When Viserys had bit him, and grabbed his egg with one hand while clinging to his bed’s headboard with the other, Aegon had left him alone in their cabin. He’d pelted the length of the ship while battle raged on the deck overhead, to where Stormcloud was pent up in his cage and shrieking for Aegon._

_He’d left his only surviving brother behind and fled on his dragon._

_Stormcloud’s strength was draining through the vicious cuts on his belly. He kept listing whenever a gust of wind took him from the side, soaking the dragon and his rider with rain._

_There was warm wet on Aegon’s cheeks and between his legs and all along Stormcloud’s lacerated belly, cold wet everywhere else. The boy wept and clung to Stormcloud’s sinuous neck, helpless to aid the struggling dragon, however much he wished to lend the beast some of his own puny strength. He rode without saddle and tack, but he had no fear of falling. Stormcloud would not let him fall._

_They fell together, landed in the courtyard at Dragonstone like a stone flung down from the sky. The dragon screamed with pain and rage and sorrow. The boy wept, could barely get the words out about the attack on their ship, Viserys lost, their desperate flight. His throat felt raw and hot, as though he’d breathed fire…_

_Till the end of his life, Aegon could just barely remember waking from a swoon to learn that Stormcloud had died. Dragonstone’s maester had murmured something about a broken heart while applying a warm compress around the boy’s chest, but all Aegon felt were the tears and the words which welled up inside him, unstoppable as a Spring flood._

_Only the tears burst forth as the maester forced milk of the poppy on him, the lip of the cup clashing violently with Aegon’s clenched teeth. The words, he kept pent up inside. To release them would have killed him._

Aegon Targaryen, the Third of His Name, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, awoke gasping and sobbing, certain he could not draw breath while his lungs burned. His face ached with the force of his sobs. He could not even open his eyes against the dark in his cavernous bedchamber, into which he flung a single name, again and again, calling out in vain. He would have believed then that he’d lost his heart long ago, except he could feel it being squeezed by something as sharp and strong and hot as a dragon’s curved, grey talon.


End file.
